Sea of Thieves is Rare’s riskiest voyage yet, but it’s a huge success

The laser-toting Soviet satellite that almost sparked a space arms race

Yuri Andropov and Ronald Reagan contemplating the biggest game of Missile Command ever

Aurich Lawson

On the evening of 23 March, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered a televised address about defence and national security. "Let me share with you a vision of the future," the president began in what was a last-minute addition to the half-hour speech. In Reagan's vision, we would "embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive." It was the first mention of Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), the plan to change America's nuclear posture from offensive to defensive. His goal was to render the Soviet nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete."

Reagan's admirers praised SDI while his critics scoffed, calling it a fantasy and assigning it the enduring nickname "Star Wars."

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The Soviet Union found itself in the rare position of joining Reagan's admirers -- they had to take SDI more seriously.

Soviet leaders feared it was an American plot to disarm their nation or surreptitiously put a battle station in orbit. Reagan's plan naturally compelled them to act.

The Soviet response was a hushed effort that came with the potential to roar. Leadership fast-tracked a space weapons system they hoped would disable US anti-missile satellites. The gist of this plan? The Soviets would use their own space program to launch weapons into orbit: nuclear missilesand lasers.

This push culminated in the Polyus-Skif mission launched on 15 May, 1987. History (and, eventually, maybe a season of The Americans) shows that the initiative failed to reach orbit. But had Polyus-Skif succeeded, space would be a very different place -- and the Cold War may have played out differently.

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Space: a historically peaceful arena Weapons have largely been kept out of space, but that's not for a lack of consideration. As early as 1949, a study led by James Lipp, the head of RAND's missile division, examined the potential of satellites to serve as exo-atmospheric bombing platforms. In light of the technology available at the time, Lipp determined that dropping bombs from an orbiting satellite or station was an impractical offensive measure. He put satellites into a different class than weapons. While satellites may aid military activity, he concluded, they could not be weapons themselves.

While dated, Lipp's opinion of satellites as inherently non-threatening was an attitude adopted by the Eisenhower administration as the space age began in earnest with Sputnik's launch in 1957. Eisenhower recognised the political benefits of advocating for the peaceful use of space, so he created a civilian space agency -- NASA -- to firmly separate space exploration from any military activity. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations furthered Eisenhower's approach. The Space Race developed as an extension of the Cold War. And while it became a battlefield with CIA spy satellites, space remained unweaponised.

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The peaceful nature of space activities was solidified with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. This document, signed by both the United States and the Soviet Union, banned the placement and installation of nuclear weapons in Earth's orbit and on the Moon.

It also banned the use of space or any celestial body for military purposes. Both superpowers went on to sign the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, which limited each nation to two anti-missile launch sites: one positioned to defend the capital city and one to defend a single base from which ICBMs were launched.

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Weapons in orbit There was a major oversight in both the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty: neither prohibited the signatories from investigating and researching space-based defence systems. Naturally, both countries exploited this loophole.

In America, years of exploring possible anti-missile systems led Reagan to pursue SDI. In the Soviet Union, leaders ordered two separate studies that explored possible defences against hypothetical American missiles. Two orbital battle station defence systems that could be disguised as Mir space station modules emerged from these studies: Skif and Kaskad.

The Energia organisation, the body behind the Soyuz spacecraft, began studying both Skif and Kaskad in 1976. After abandoning the initial plan to use both stations to shoot down American intercontinental ballistic missiles mid-flight, Energia decided that both could be used to disable American anti-missile satellites instead. Kaskad would target high orbiting satellites with missiles while Skif would target low orbital satellites with lasers. No American satellites existed or were even in production. But for the Soviets, this was an irrelevant detail. (Skif is also called Polyus-Skif -- polyus being the Russian word for pole [as in the North Pole] and Skif referring to an ancient tribe of warriors in central Asia.)

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By 1983, both the Polyus-Skif and Kaskad projects had been simmering in laboratories for years, undergoing preliminary tests at the Salyut bureau within Energia. But SDI was the catalyst both projects needed to get moving. If Reagan was proposing that America set up a battle station in space -- which the Soviet leadership suspected might be the case -- they wanted to be ready. The rubles started pouring in after Reagan's speech, and work accelerated as concepts turned into hardware.

Skif-DM takes shape But an influx of any currency could only do so much to make a new satellite flight ready. In the interest of launching a spacecraft sooner, Soviet leaders came up with an interim plan: adapt a small, one-megawatt carbon dioxide laser and turn it into a Polyus-Skif testbed. It was a piece of hardware that had already been tested as a weapon against missiles while mounted on an Il-76 transport aircraft. In August 1984, the interim spacecraft was approved and designated Skif-D, the "D" standing for the Russian word for "demonstration."

There was another problem. Even the smaller Skif-D was too big for the Soviet Proton launch vehicle. But as luck would have it, there was a bigger rocket already in the pipeline. The Energia rocket, named after its design bureau, was designed to carry the Buran space shuttle into orbit. It was an immensely powerful rocket, capable of carrying 95 tons into space. It could handle Skif-D without a problem.

As production progressed, Skif-D was cobbled together from existing hardware, including pieces of the Buran shuttle and parts cannibalised from the cancelled Almaz military space station. The spacecraft that emerged was a monster: 40 metres long and slightly more than 4 metres in diametre. In total it weighed nearly 100,000 kg. Skif-D dwarfed Nasa's Skylab space station. Fortunately for its designers, it was long and thin enough to fit on the side of the Energia, running along its central fuel tank.

Skif-D had two major components: a "functional block" and a "purposeful module." The functional block housed small rocket engines used to place the payload into its final orbit, as well as a power system made from solar panels borrowed from Almaz. The purposeful module carried carbon dioxide tanks and two turbo-generators. These were the systems that produced the laser's power -- the turbo-generators pumped the stored carbon dioxide, exciting the atoms until they emitted light.

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The challenge was that the turbo-generators were large moving parts, and the gas got so hot it had to be vented. These actions imparted enough motion to the spacecraft that it made the space-based laser incredibly imprecise. To counter these oscillations, Polyus engineers developed a system that sent the expelled gas through deflectors, and they added a turret to make fine adjustments to the laser's aim.

Engineers finally realised that the whole Skif system was so immensely complicated that each component would have to be tested on a separate mission before a full station could be launched. This setback was overlooked, though, when a launch opportunity arose in 1985. The Buran shuttle was falling badly behind schedule and wouldn't be ready for the planned first launch of the Energia rocket, scheduled for late in 1986. Energia's designers wanted to launch a dummy payload in Buran's place so they could test their rocket, but Skif's designers stepped in to take over the launch.

The first Energia would carry Polyus-Skif into orbit.

Having a launch opportunity so close on the horizon forced Polyus' designers to come up with another interim mission. The decision was made to test the functional block's control system, the gas ejection vents, and the laser targeting system; the spacecraft would not fly with a functioning laser. This new spacecraft was christened Skif-DM -- D for demonstration and M for "maket," the Russian word for "dummy" -- and scheduled to launch in the fall of 1986.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome as it appeared to American U-2 reconnaissance planes during the Cold War

CIA, via Wikimedia Commons

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Meeting the deadline

By January 1986, the Politburo had designated Polyus-Skif as one of the Soviet space program's highest-priority satellites. At one point, more than 70 firms within the Soviet aerospace industry were working on the program. There were no excuses for workers running behind schedule, not even the fact that most involved were also fighting to keep the Buran program from falling further behind.

As the launch neared, Soviet engineers started figuring out the mission's cover stories. Polyus' designers knew that when such a huge craft appeared in orbit and started expelling large amounts of gas, it wouldn't escape notice of the American intelligence analysts. They also knew that the gases expelled from the spacecraft would be a dead giveaway that the system was intended for a laser.

To cover the spacecraft's true purpose, engineers switched the gas for Skif-DM's vent test to a combination of xenon and krypton.

These gases interact with ionospheric plasma around Earth. If anyone asked, the Soviets could say it was part of a civilian geophysical experiment. Another of Skif-DM's tests, the laser targeting system tests, called for the satellite to release small inflatable balloon targets it could then track with its radar and pointing laser. The balloons could just as easily be targets in a test of the spacecraft's automated rendezvous and docking system.

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It's inevitable that test programs experience launch delays, and Skif-DM was no exception. But the minor technical problems that dogged the program paled in comparison to the political ones.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who was by then general secretary of the Communist Party, was advocating sweeping economic and bureaucratic reforms. One target was what he saw as "ruinous" levels of military spending, which included Soviet military space programs. Gorbachev acknowledged that the American SDI was dangerous, but he suggested it wasn't a major threat. Nevertheless, when he and Reagan met at a US-Soviet summit in Reykjavik in October of 1986, talks leading to an arms reduction deal fell apart when the American president refused to abandon SDI.

With failed negotiations available to him, Gorbachev decided to use them as part of a new propaganda plan against the American SDI.

Suddenly, the demonstration of gas venting and target sighting fit into this vision. An order came down from the top layers of government to change the mission. All "battle station" experiments were cancelled; the spacecraft could be launched into orbit, but the gas venting system could not be tested and the tracking targets could not be deployed. In January of 1987, with Skif-DM's launch weeks away, a formal order came from Gorbachev's allies in the Politburo that turned the mission into a passive one.

Early in 1987, the Skif-DM satellite was mated to its Energia booster inside an assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Technicians painted the payload black to maximise solar heating in orbit and then added two names on the spacecraft: "Polyus," how the spacecraft would be introduced to the world after launch, and "Mir-2," the name of the proposed civilian space station that Energia's leadership hoped to build. Finally mated, the rocket was rolled out to the launch pad and hoisted to the vertical launch position.

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It sat on the pad for more than three months; the launch was postponed to coincide with Gorbachev's scheduled visit to the Cosmodrome. He arrived on 12 May for a tour of the Energia facilities and an up-close look at the Energia-Polyus. Throughout the visit, he made several remarks to suggest that his support for the program as a whole was waning. He questioned Buran's (and, by extension the Energia rocket's) necessity and voiced his opposition to the militarisation of space. But he also gave Skif-DM his official green light for launch. When the Soviet news agency TASS issued a report on Gorbachev's visit to the Cosmodrome, it mentioned that a new rocket was ready on the launch pad. It was the first the world heard of Energia.

Skif-Polyus takes flight At 9:30 in the evening, Moscow time, on 15 May, 1987, Energia's engines roared to life for the first time. The giant rocket lifted off the launch pad. It climbed into the sky, pitching 65-degrees on a trajectory that ensured if the worst happened -- if the whole thing exploded and rained burning shrapnel from the sky -- it wouldn't fall on foreign territory and become an international incident. But fears of a launch failure were unrealised. Energia performed flawlessly, gaining speed as it rose and arced out toward the northern Pacific. Right on cue, Skif-DM separated from rocket; the spent rocket and the protective shroud over the spacecraft fell away.

Flying on its own, Polyus-Skif had to execute one key manoeuvre: it had to flip itself over before igniting its engines. Because the satellite was so rushed in its production, the functional block was a repurposed unit originally designed for the Proton rocket. It wasn't built to sustain the vibrations of the Energia's much more powerful engines. The quick fix had been to mount the spacecraft with the control block at the top of the stack instead of at the bottom near the engines. The spacecraft needed to flip over, putting the control block's engines facing down toward Earth before firing its main engines to achieve orbit.

This one command failed. The rushed production behind the Skif-DM -- all the compromises and shortcuts -- had left an erroneous line of code in the computer. The spacecraft flipped itself over twice, then stopped with its nose pointing to the Earth. When the engines fired, Skif-DM headed straight back toward the Earth. It broke up and burned as it reentered the atmosphere.

In the end

In the West, the debut of the Energia rocket was reported as a partial success. And this is true. Although the satellite failed to achieve orbit, the rocket operated perfectly. It was a great coup for Energia, but it wasn't enough to save the Polyus-Skif and Kaskad programs. Skif-DM's failure, combined with the single mission's incredible cost, gave the program's opponents the ammunition they needed to kill it. Further Skif flights were cancelled. Hardware was scrapped. The laser never got close enough to launching for anyone to judge whether it would have worked against American satellites. None of the hundreds of engineers that had created Polyus and enabled Skif-DM were recognised for their efforts.

As for what happened to the scrapped parts of the cancelled Skif missions, there are rumours that the hardware was appropriated into the International Space Station. The first piece of the ISS launched was the Russian Zarya ("Dawn") module, also known as the Functional Cargo Block. It supplies electrical power and the ability to reboost the station, the same role the Skif's functional block was designed to serve. It's possible Zarya began life as a spare built for the Polyus program or that it was built off old Polyus blueprints, either of which would explain the fact that Zarya was delivered on time and under budget.

Details about the Polyus launch and spacecraft remain elusive.

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Records are likely buried deep in inaccessible Russian archives, as are documents recording the Soviet leadership's reaction to Reagan's SDI speech. Official government reports about the American reaction to the Polyus-Skif launch are similarly buried. It's a seldom discussed mission, but it's clear that the merits and efficiency of space-based weapons were very nearly explored with functioning hardware. It's troubling to think what would have happened had Polyus-Skif actually made it to orbit, how the Americans might have responded, and what kind of space arms race might have ensued.

This story originally appeared on ars technica. Click through for more pictures